Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Cleanup Woman

It all starts with the fact that I don't care what my surroundings look like and never have. Like most kids my room would after a time become a mess. This never bothered me. As I said, I didn't care. My mother, however, did care. A lot. Like everything else. So when she got tired of looking at it, she'd do one of two things. She'd either make me clean it up or she'd clean it up herself.

If she made me clean it up, she had me do it to her standard. Only her standard seemed to me to be perfection. No matter how much I did, now matter how hard I worked, it seemed like it was never enough. I'm not arguing I should have been allowed a weak or half-hearted attempt at cleaning. I just shouldn't have been held to an adult standard.

If she cleaned it up, then the fun really began, because my mother had no regard for what I wanted as far as my room goes. She asked me what color walls I wanted in my room once. I said purple. She painted the room pink. She tried to tell me it was lavender, but we had the Crayola® 64 pack of crayons and I wasn't buying it. I think the room is still the same vomitous shade of pink to this day.

So, since, as I said, she didn't care at all what I wanted, when she cleaned the room she put things wherever she wanted them. And since she didn't care about my stuff, she didn't remember where she put stuff when she did it. So if she cleaned my room, I instantly was unable to use it for anything I wanted.

Hence my cleaning problem, as I call it. When I start cleaning, it's back breaking and fatiguing and I don't know when to stop. And I cannot ask for help, because I am deathly afraid I will not be able to find anything again. And considering the difficulty I have remembering where things are when I do it myself, this is seriously a problem.

Aside from the shenanigans with the ex-wife, this is my final huge hurdle to face. But I do hold out hope that I can get this done.

Fly Lady Update:

I dusted today and that's about it. The time it took me to find the duster in the store today pretty much put me off track for the rest of the evening because of my evening appointments. But I will give it a good whack again tomorrow.



Betty Wright

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